Suspend Your Disbelief

Archive for 2009

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Harper Perennial celebrates the short story

by Anne Stameshkin

Harper Perennial is already building buzz for its upcoming Summer of the Short Story campaign, declaring that “it’s high time to celebrate the much-loved, but oft-overlooked, short story form.” The publisher will promote six new collections (due to publish this summer and fall)—along with six collections of classic shorts. The festivities will begin in earnest this May, but in the meantime, Perennial is featuring a new story every week in 2009 on a site called Fifty-Two Stories. According to Cal Morgan: Some of them will be new stories from our original collections, or from upcoming hardcovers; some original contributions never […]


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recommended reading: benefit for PEN America, featuring Edward Albee, Deborah Eisenberg, and others…

by Anne Stameshkin

Come one, come all to Global Correspondence: A Benefit Reading for PEN America When: February 24 @ 7 pm Where: Cooper Union’s Great Hall (7 East 7th St, NYC) Who: André Aciman, Edward Albee, Anthony Appiah, Lydia Davis, Deborah Eisenberg, Nathan Englander, Janet Malcolm, Francine Prose, Sarah Ruhl, and more Tickets are $15/$12 for students and PEN members. $50 tickets include a wine and cheese reception to follow. Click here to buy tickets. RSVP or invite others on Facebook. PEN America is a literary journal published by PEN, an organization dedicated to defending human rights and works around the globe. […]


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fictionalizing Bolaño

by Anne Stameshkin

Forget the fictionalized memoir…here’s a novelist who seems to have revised his life story both on and off the page. Was Roberto Bolaño actually in Chile, as he proudly claimed, at the time of Pinochet’s military coup? Did he make up his story of heroin addiction and recovery? (His wife says he did.) Bolaño reportedly “liked to play tricks and create mysteries” and “may just have been trying to lay a trap for his future biographers.” Was he playing at being a posterity-worthy figure (not just writer)? Or was it all just an intellectual game? Manuel Llorente, the editor of […]


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"The stage is bare. Enter an actor and a book."

by Anne Stameshkin

On the Penguin-UK blog, sales manager Fiona Buckland considers the possibilities of selling books in a “theatre of limited means.” In one of the darkest years of the 1930s depression, Allen Lane founded Penguin with the — then groundbreaking — notion to sell quality writing as cheaply as a pack of cigarettes and to sell them everywhere. Studying our own history gives us pause for thought as we tip headfirst into recession: bleak economic times are sometimes the crucible of inspiration and creativity. I think of the black box theatres so beloved of Peter Brook and endless student productions, in […]


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requiems

by Anne Stameshkin

Lorrie Moore, on Updike’s passing: The news that he died in a hospice not far from his house, and the new ordinariness of this current manner of death, made me wonder what he would have noticed and written about it —“I’m sure it will be discovered he was taking notes,” a friend said, hopefully — for he was gifted at describing everything. Mr. Updike’s novels wove an explicit and teeming tapestry of male and female appetites. He noticed astutely, precisely, unnervingly. His stories, some of the best ever written by anyone, were jewels of existential comedy, domestic anguish and restraint. […]


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Washington Post to discontinue stand-alone Book World

by Anne Stameshkin

Sadness. Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with the New York Times Book Review. The Washington Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising. […] “This is disheartening,” said Jane Ciabattari, president of the NBCC, after hearing that the section was indeed being closed. “The only good news is that books coverage continues and that the section is intact online. But the print edition of the stand alone Book World was cherished by readers throughout […]


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Rabbit at Rest

by Anne Stameshkin

Sad news: John Updike succumbed to lung cancer today at the age of 76. William Pritchard has drawn up a list of what he considers the author’s most important works here. I remember hiding the Rabbit books under my bed as a teenager, loving how Updike could write even the dirtiest moments so beautifully. His prose is always alive, startlingly specific, full of those little truths we seek in literature. The first time I read “A&P,” I was 16 and bowled over by descriptions like this: Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the […]


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warning: reading leads to "vivid mental simulations of narrative situations"

by Anne Stameshkin

A Wash-U study using magnetic resonance imaging suggests that reading stories is anything but passive: Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.


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something's gotta work: more publishing linkage

by Anne Stameshkin

– Lev Grossman looks back as well as forward when considering the future of publishing. – Motoko Rich examines the industry’s new austerity. – Julian Gough makes a modest (bailout) proposal. – Boris Kachka suggests resurrecting Robert Giroux. – Spotted via Bookslut, Patti Holt makes an argument for ditching hardcovers altogether: – And should you feel like buying a book today, a panel of reviewers at The Guardian takes a stab at naming the 1,000 novels everyone must read. Bonus: it’s not just a list; there is a paragraph-long description of each. If you feel an important book has been […]




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